GUEST BLOG POST: Creative Education — UK NACCCE Report

Editor’s Note: Naijagraphitti Blog wishes to positively affect the Nigeria’s educational curriculum. We do not have to wait for a full scale revision if our educationalists would imbibe lessons on how other countries have tweaked their formal and informal learning models. This is the only way to improve building creative thinking and problem solving skills into our present inflexible rote learning. Several countries have taken this initiative. Today we wish to share from the British example.

In February 1998, the the British Secretary of State for Education and Employment, the Rt.Hon David Blunkett MP and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the Rt. Hon Chris Smith MP  established the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE) to advice the government on its National Education Curriculum review. The NACCCE was headed by Professor Kenneth Robinson then of the University of Warwick. The terms of reference were: To make recommendations to the Secretaries of State on the creative and cultural development of young people through formal and informal education: to take stock of current provision and to make proposals for principles, policies and practice.  

In May, 1999, the NACCCE submitted a landmark 243-page report entitled All Our Futures - Creativity, Culture and Education. The report makes recommendations for provision in formal and informal education for young people to the age of 16: that is, to the end of compulsory education. The committee’s inquiry coincided with the Government’s planned review of the National Curriculum. This report includes specific recommendations on the UK National Curriculum. It also included recommendations for a wider national strategy for creative and cultural education.
This particular section of the report buttresses the need and utility value of creative education and new skills in education.

Chapter 2 – Creative Education

Introduction

23. The word ‘creativity’ is used in different ways, in different contexts. It has an ‘elusive definition’1. The problems of definition lie in its particular associations with the arts, in the complex nature of creative activity itself, and in the variety of theories that  have been  developed to explain it. Some people doubt that creativity can be taught at all. They see creativity as a natural capacity with limited room for improvement through education. Our proposals are intended to show that creativity can be developed and how this  might be done. In this section we offer our definition of creativity and the implications we see for promoting the creative development of young people.

Defining Creativity

24. Creativity is obviously to do with producing something original. But there are different views of what is involved in this process and about how common the capacity for creativity is.

Sectoral Definition

25. Many people associate creativity primarily with the arts2. Music, drama, art, dance, literature, and the rest, are often called ‘the creative arts’. As we said in Chapter One, the professional arts and associated fields are now known as the ‘creative industries’. The ‘creative arts’ are often contrasted with the sciences, which tend to be thought of as uncreative. One of our aims in this report is to emphasize the importance of the arts and their essential place in creative development. But creativity is not unique to the arts. It is equally fundamental to advances in the sciences, in mathematics, technology, in politics, business and in all areas of everyday life.

Élite Definition

26. It is sometimes thought that only very rare people are creative and that creativity involves unusual talents. The literature of creativity often focuses on the great men and women who  have produced or made path-breaking compositions, paintings, inventions or theories. Such people, it is sometimes said, make their mark without special help and may even gain strength from educational failure. For both reasons it is assumed that there is limited scope and little point in trying to educate for creativity. Obviously, there are people with exceptional creative gifts. The élite conception of creativity is important because it focuses attention on creative achievements which are of historic originality, which push back the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding. These achievements constitute the highest levels of creativity. Education must certainly nurture young people who are capable of such achievements. But there are other considerations.

Democratic Definition

27. In our view, all people are capable of creative achievement in some area of activity, provided the conditions are right and they have acquired the relevant knowledge and skills. Moreover, a democratic society should provide opportunities for everyone to succeed according to  their own strengths and abilities. Meeting the various  challenges we have  described, economic, technological, social, and personal, involves realizing the capacities of all  young people, and not only those with obviously  exceptional  ability. There is no doubt that some highly creative individuals do thrive in adversity — we have  such people on this committee. But others do not. There is no way of knowing the current scale of frustration or waste of creative capacities in our schools. In our view:

a.  creative possibilities are pervasive in the concerns of everyday life, its purposes and problems;

b.  creative activity is also pervasive: many people who are being  creative do not recognize that this is what they are doing;

c.  creativity can be expressed in collaborative and collective as well as individual activities, in teamwork and in organizations, in communities and in governments.

For all these reasons, we favour a democratic conception of creativity: one which recognizes the potential for creative achievement in all fields of human activity; and the capacity for such achievements in the many and not the few. To justify this approach we need to say what we mean by creativity.

Creativity: Our Definition

28. Defining a process that covers such a wide range of activities and personal styles is inherently difficult. Ours is a stipulative definition, but it takes account of what we understand about the nature of creative processes and of the ways in which key words are used in different contexts. It is also in a sense an indicative definition in that it points to features of creative processes that we want to encourage for educational purposes. Our starting point is to recognize four characteristics of creative processes. First, they always involve thinking or behaving imaginatively. Second, overall this imaginative activity is purposeful: that is, it is directed to achieving an objective. Third, these processes must generate something original. Fourth, the outcome must be of value in relation to the objective. We therefore define creativity as:

Imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value.

We want to comment briefly on these four characteristics. On this basis we will develop our view that creativity is possible in all areas of human activity and that everyone has creative capacities.

Four Features of Creativity

Using Imagination

29. Imaginative activity in our terms is not the same as fantasizing or imaging, although it may involve both. It is not simply producing mental representations of things that are not present or  have not been experienced. Imaginative activity is the process of generating something original: providing an alternative to the expected, the conventional, or the routine. This activity involves processes of thinking or behaving. The behaviour may include activities where thought is embodied in the movement: such as in performance and other forms where there is not necessarily a prefigurative  thinking. Imaginative activity is a form of mental play — serious  play directed towards some creative purpose. It is a mode of thought which is essentially generative : in which we attempt to expand the possibilities of a given situation; to look at it afresh or from a new perspective, envisaging alternatives to the routine or expected in any given task. Creative insights often occur when existing ideas are combined or reinterpreted in unexpected ways or when they are applied in areas with which they are not normally associated. Often this arises by making unusual connections, seeing analogies and relationships between ideas or objects that have not previously been related.

Pursuing Purposes

30. Creativity carries with it the idea of action and purpose. It is, in a sense, applied imagination. The imaginative activity is fashioned, and often refashioned, in pursuit of an objective. To speak of somebody being creative is to suggest that they are actively engaged in making or producing something in a deliberate way. This is not to say that creative insights or breakthroughs may not occur unexpectedly along the way, for example by intuition or non-directed thought, but they occur on the way to something: to meeting the overall objective, or to solving the central problem. This can be a highly dynamic process, whose eventual outcomes can be quite different than from those anticipated at the outset. Sometimes the objective changes as new ideas and possibilities come into view: sometimes, as with inventions and discoveries, new purposes are found when an initial product or idea has emerged.

Being Original

31. Creativity always involves originality. But there are different categories of originality

·         Individual

A person’s work may be original in relation to their own previous work and output.

·         Relative

It may be original in relation to their peer group: to other young people of the same age, for example.

·         Historic

The work may be original in terms of anyone’s previous output in a particular field: that is, it may be uniquely original.

There can also be degrees of originality within these categories: of greater or less originality in relation to individual or group output. Originality in creative work will often be judged to be of  the first two categories. For reasons we come to, this can be of considerable importance in the general education of each individual. But in our view exceptional individual achievement - that is, of historic originality - is also more likely to emerge from a system of education which encourages the creative capacities of everyone.

Judging Value

32. We described imaginative activity as a generative mode of thought; creativity involves a second and reciprocal mode of thought: an evaluative mode. Originality at some level is essential in all creative work, but it is never enough. Original ideas may be irrelevant to the  purpose in hand. They may be bizarre, or faulty. The outcome of imaginative activity can only be called creative if it is of value in relation to the task at hand. ‘Value’ here is a judgement of some property of the outcome related to the purpose. There are many possible judgements according to the area of activity: effective, useful, enjoyable, satisfying, valid, tenable. The criteria of value vary according to the field of activity in question.

33. Creative activity involves playing with ideas and trying out possibilities. In any creative  process there are likely to be dead-ends: ideas and designs that do not work. There may be many failures and modifications and much refashioning of imaginative activity before the best outcomes, the best ‘fit’ is produced. A similar process may then take place in terms of the application of a creative outcome. Evaluating which ideas do work and which do not requires judgement and criticism. In this way creative thinking always involves some critical thinking. Understanding this is an important foundation for creative education. There is a distinction, and there may be differences, between the evaluations made by the creator and those made by  others. Equally, the value of something may only be recognized over time. We will come back to this later in discussing the links between creative and cultural development.

34. Critical evaluation involves a shift in the focus of attention and mode of thinking as we attend   to what is working or not working. This can happen throughout the process of creativity and not only at the end. It can permeate the process of generating ideas: it can involve standing back in quiet reflection. It can be individual or shared, involve instant judgements or long-term testing. In most creative work there are many shifts between these two modes of thought and focus of attention. The quality of creative achievement is related to both. Helping young people to understand and manage this interaction between generative and evaluative thinking is a pivotal task of creative education.

The Processes of Creativity

35. Creative abilities are developed through practical application: by being engaged in the processes of creative thought production: making  music, writing stories, conducting experiments and so on. A key task for teachers is to help young people to understand these processes and to gain control of them. These are particular techniques and skills which are specific to different disciplines and forms of work. But there are also some general features of creative processes which young people need to experience and recognize.

36. Creative processes in all disciplines normally involve an initial phase of drafting: of giving an idea a rough shape or outline. This may be the first notes of a melody; a first image or metaphor; the first sketch of a problem in mathematics. The process of development is commonly one of ‘successive approximations’ in which the idea is shaped and clarified in the process of exploring it. The final phases are often to do with refining the detail of the expression: with producing the neat copy, so to speak. The classical division of stages in creative thought - preparation-incubation-illumination then verification - is contested in various ways by different scholars but it does alert us to the common pattern of focus, withdrawal and  then breakthrough and to the key point that creativity is a process, not an event. The form of this withdrawal from thinking about a problem, and the best circumstances for its success, are personal to the individual but often involves waking/sleeping moments, or a ‘moving meditation’ as we do other things. Creative activity involves a complex combination of controlled and non-controlled elements, unconscious as well as conscious mental processes, non-directed as well as directed thought, intuitive as well as rational calculation.

37. Deferment of judgment is an invaluable element as we produce ideas and then stretch them and connect them imaginatively as far as they can go. Although there is always a stage, maybe many stages, where critical appraisal is necessary, if only to assess coherence and relate ideas to evidence, practicability, utility and audience response, generative thinking has to be given time to flower. At the right time and in the right way, rigorous critical appraisal is essential. At the wrong point, criticism and the cold hand of realism can kill an emerging idea.

38. This dialogue between initial conception and final realization can be delicate. It can be halted or inhibited by trying to do too much too soon or at the same time. For example, asking children to write a poem right away in their best handwriting can destroy the spontaneity they need in the initial phase of generating ideas. They need to be helped to understand that creativity often develops in phases; and to have some sense of where they are in the process and what to expect of themselves there. We have identified two modes of thought: generative and evaluative. The balance between these must be right. In most situations, trying to produce a finished version in one move is for most people an improbable task. Not understanding this can make young people and adults alike conclude that they are not really creative after all.

39. We said earlier that creativity is possible in all areas of human activity and not only in the arts. This is clearly true. Creative insights and advances have driven forward human culture in the sciences, in technology, in philosophy, the arts and the humanities. The history of science, indeed the essential process, is one of continuous conjectures and of re-evaluations of established  ideas: of new insights or information, challenging and building on existing knowledge. This is the source of the intellectual excitement and creative impulse of  science: that it is concerned not only with facts, but with what count as facts; not only with observation but with explanation — with interpretation and with meaning. The processes of  scientific analysis and investigation can involve the highest levels of creativity and insight.  Discovery in science is not always strictly logical. It often results from unexpected leaps of  imagination: from sudden moments of illumination in which the scientist grasps the answer to a problem and then sets out to verify it by calculation. This can be as true for children setting out as for experienced scientists.

40. The creative process of the arts involves developing forms of expression which embody the artist’s perceptions. This is not a matter of identifying an idea and then finding a form in which to express it. It is through shaping the individual work that the ideas and feelings are given form. Often it is only through developing the dance, image or music that the perception itself is clarified. The meaning is uniquely available in the form in which it is expressed. It is in these forms that we express our most human perceptions and feelings. The creative processes of the arts centre on the shaping and refining of a work in which its aesthetic qualities are central to its meaning. The look, sound and feel of work in the arts is inseparable not only from what it means, but from how it means.

41. Discussions about the arts in education often emphasize the value of self-expression, and this is an important idea. But there is a difference between giving direct vent to feelings —as in a cry of pain or a jump for joy — and the creative processes of the arts. Composing and playing music, writing poetry, making a dance may all be driven by powerful emotional impulses; but the process is not simply one of discharging feelings —though it may involve that — but of giving them form and meaning. It is essential for education to provide opportunities for young people to express their own ideas, values and feelings. In recent years, there has been a new recognition of the vital importance of what Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence: the ability to understand, express and use our feelings and intuition. Goleman, and many before him, points to the changes and the problems that can follow from difficulties in understanding and expressing our emotions. The recent report by the Mental Health Foundation (see paragraph 16) confirms these concerns. There are many ways in schools of enabling young people to discuss and express their feelings and emotions. Among the most important are the arts.

Problem-Solving

42. Problem-solving is now a key skill in education. Developing young people’s abilities to solve problems is fundamental to preparing them for an independent life. Creative education can  contribute directly to problem-solving abilities in all disciplines and fields of work. But creativity and problem- solving are not the same thing. Not all problems call for creative solutions or original thinking. Some can be solved routinely and logically. And not all creative thinking is directed to solving problems, in the conventional sense. Composing poetry, painting pictures or ‘playing’ with abstract ideas in science or mathematics are not always problem-solving as normally understood. The value of creative thinkers is not only that they solve problems we know we have, but that they find problems we hadn’t imagined and lead us on to new horizons.  More opportunities should be given to young people to sense and define problems for themselves, as well as identifying solutions to given problems. More opportunities should be given to the generation of ideas; looking at the world in different ways and playing with different possibilities and alternative solutions. Familiarity with a wide range of problem-solving activities can lead to greater competence in seeing underlying patterns and analogies.

Creativity and Intelligence

43. Creativity is a basic capacity of human intelligence. Human intelligence is not only creative, but diverse and multifaceted. It is for this reason that we argue that all young people have creative capacities and they all have them differently.

The Variety of Intelligence

44. A key characteristic of human intelligence is our capacity for representing experience in various ways. This capacity is basic to how we think and communicate. Verbal language is the most obvious example of this capacity. As they learn a language children are not only learning how to name things: they are acquiring the patterns of ideas and understanding which are inherent in their language. In learning to speak they are also learning ways to think. But we think and communicate in other ways too. Our experiences are of many kinds and we use a wide variety of ways to make sense of them. Words help us to formulate some ideas but not others: equally mathematics makes possible ideas which are otherwise inconceivable. There  are ideas, feelings and perceptions that will not go into either. To understand these we turn to other modes of expression and communication.

45. Our primary perceptions of the world are through the senses: through light, sound, shape, texture, smell and movement. The fact is that we not only experience the world in these different ways, we think in them too. A person painting a picture is thinking visually; a musician is thinking in sound. Dancers think in space and movement. These are not substitutes for words; they illustrate the rich diversity of human intelligence and the many different modes in which we think and communicate. A painter is not producing images of ideas that could be expressed equally well in words or numbers. He or she is presenting visual ideas. Musicians are expressing ideas that can only be fully understood through music. Conventional education tends to emphasize verbal and mathematical reasoning. These are vital to the intellectual development of all young people but they are not the whole of intelligence.

46. Most children spend most of their time in school reading, writing and thinking in words or numbers. In higher education, essay writing and note taking are the principal forms of study. Using words and numbers are among the highest achievements of human intelligence, but if it were limited to these, most of personal experience would be incommunicable and most of human culture would not have happened. The worlds we live in are as rich and various as they are because our minds are so complex and diverse. Philosophers, psychologists and educationalists have long recognized this diversity of human intelligence. A recent formulation is Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner 1993). Gardner identifies seven forms of intelligence: linguistic, mathematical, spatial, kinaesthetic  musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal. This is not a fixed list. There are other ways of categorizing  types of intelligence (White 1998). The numbers of  intelligences and the exact ways in which they are classified are less important than the fact that intelligence is multifaceted. There are two important implications of this argument, for education in general and for creative education in particular.

47. First, the tendency now is to think of children as ‘able’ or ‘less able’, primarily on the basis of academic performance. Academic ability consists primarily a facility for propositional knowledge and linear forms of reasoning. All children have such abilities to varying degrees and it is essential that they should be developed. But it is neither accurate nor responsible to judge  children’s intellectual abilities in general on the basis of these abilities alone. It would be more accurate to think of all children having a profile of abilities across a wide range of intelligences. Second, children who perform poorly in conventional academic tests may have strong abilities in other areas. Children with high academic ability may be highly able in other areas too. A child with poor spatial abilities may have high linguistic or aural intelligence. Some children have particular capacities for mathematics, for music, for dance, for languages, or for several of these. When children discover their real strengths, there can be a dramatic change in their overall motivation in education. Judging children against a single standard of ability can misrepresent their own individual strengths. Discovering them can enormously increase self-esteem, confidence and achievement as a whole. A commitment to developing children’s human resources must begin from a recognition of how wide, rich and diverse these resources really are.

The Dynamics of Intelligence

48. Intelligence is multi-dimensional: it is also dynamic. In the 1960s, research in the USA suggested that the two hemispheres of the brain have different functions. The left hemisphere was found to be largely concerned with logical, analytical thought: the right hemisphere with  more ‘holistic’ modes of thinking, with recognition of faces, patterns and with spatial movement. The two halves of the brain are joined by a shaft of nerve fibres, the corpus callosum. This facilitates interaction between the two hemispheres and between different modes of activity. More recent studies confirm that different areas of the brain are strongly associated with different types of activity: with speech, emotions, touch, spatial orientation and so on. They also show that the brain does not work in separate, isolated compartments, but as a whole dynamic system. Different areas of the brain work together during different types of activity. During speech, for example, the patterns of brain activity are different according to whether we are speaking our mother tongue or a second language.

49. Some modes of thinking dominate in different types of activity — the aural in music, the spatial/kinaesthetic in dance, the mathematical in physics. But these, and most other forms of intellectual activity, draw on different areas of intelligence simultaneously — they are multi-modal. Mathematicians, for example, often talk of ‘visualizing’ problems and solutions. Dance is closely related to musical understanding: visual arts draw deeply from spatial intelligence. The composition of music is often informed by an understanding of mathematics. Research in Europe and the United States (Fox & Gardiner 1997) has suggested for example that music education can have a direct effect on improvement in mathematical ability. Equally, drama can be a powerful way of promoting skills in reading, writing and in speech. Creative insight often occurs when new connections are made between ideas or experiences that were not previously related. This happens across as well as within different modes of thinking.

Developing Creativity

50. There is considerable debate about, and a growing body of research into the idea of transferable skills: that is, skills of creative thought and production that apply in different domains of creative activity. The literature and many of the practical programmes on creative thinking certainly suggest that there are general skills that can be used across many different fields. It is also the case that some people are creative in many areas. The following themes  are suggested by experience and research and are important in planning policies and strategies for creative education.

• Creativity is best construed not as a single power, which you either have or do not, but as multidimensional: Creative processes involve many different mental functions combinations of skills and personality attributes5. They involve special purposes for familiar mental operations6 and the more efficient use of our ordinary abilities, not ‘something profoundly different’ (Boden 1990:259).

• Some creative abilities are ‘domain specific’. Some of the specific skills and techniques of mathematics or physics or drawing or playing the piano are specific to those activities and do not necessarily transfer to each other nor to other areas.

• The creative strengths of any one person may be specific to particular fields or types of activity: Creativity involves working in a medium. The medium may be conceptual, as in mathematics. It may involve a physical medium: an instrument, clay, fabrics or steel. For many people, creative ability is stimulated by the ‘feel’ of the materials and the activity in question. If a person does not find their best medium, they may never discover what their creative potential is, and never experience the pleasures, satisfactions and achievements that follow.

Experience suggests that some, perhaps many people feel disaffected by education and suffer a sense of failure precisely because they have never discovered where their own unique abilities lie. For all of those reasons, schools need to promote a broad approach to creativity across the curriculum and a broad and balanced curriculum. In doing so, it is important to recognize two fundamental dynamics of creative processes.

Freedom and Control

51. Creativity is not simply a matter of ‘letting go’. It is sometimes assumed that creativity only emerges from ‘free expression’ and lack of inhibitions or constraints. This is very misleading. Freedom to experiment is essential for creativity .But so too are skills, knowledge and understanding. Being creative in music, or in physics, or dance, or mathematics, involves knowledge and expertise in the skills, materials and forms of understanding that they involve. It is possible to have a limited creative impact in some fields with little knowledge of them. But sustained creative achievement involves knowledge of the field in question and skills in the media concerned. Creativity in music requires increasing control in the production and dynamics of sound: creativity in mathematics or science requires increasing skills in numeracy. It is possible to teach all of these and not promote creative ability at all: indeed, to stifle it. But the alternative is not to disregard the teaching of skills and understanding, but to recognize the mutual dependence of freedom and control at the heart of creative process.

Creativity and Culture

52. There is a further point which has important implications for teaching methods, and for the curriculum. Creativity is sometimes seen as an entirely individual process. The popular image of creative genius is of the  lone individual producing unique insights out of the air. Some individuals do work  alone, and  the course of  history has  been changed by the extraordinary creative insights of particularly gifted people. But for everyone, creative  achievement always draws from the ideas and achievements of  other people: from the books, theories, poems, music, architecture, design and the rest that  mark  the trails of other people’s creative  journeys. Just as  different modes of thinking interact in a single mind, individual creativity is affected by dialogue with others. In these ways, creative development is intimately related to cultural development.

Conclusion

53. In this section we have defined what we mean by creativity and said what we see as its main features. In our view, creativity is possible in  all fields of human  intelligence; and this is diverse and multifaceted. Genuine creative achievement involves knowledge, control and discipline combined with the freedom and confidence to experiment.

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